


every time you blink (i’ll make a wish come true)。

by aesterismo



Category: Kuroko no Basuke | Kuroko's Basketball
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-20
Updated: 2012-12-20
Packaged: 2017-11-21 16:11:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,201
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/599677
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aesterismo/pseuds/aesterismo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Seasons of life, longing, and love.</p>
            </blockquote>





	every time you blink (i’ll make a wish come true)。

Wait, Kise thinks, is a word he’ll never be able to say.  
  
Logic refuses him that simple command. Wait – for what? He’s a fighter to the core, relentless and tireless heart. His legs are weak but his will, diamond-strong, keeps him reaching out. Time waits for no one so he, in turn, chooses to stay behind.  
  
Everything he wants remains within reach. Except for what he wants most.  
  
Affection is a human necessity. That much Kise knows. But hierarchies and complexes aside, he knows he holds onto people too tightly, clings to them with the vehemence of someone who knows the inevitable future will someday separate them.  
  
So he hovers close behind, along the pathways made by retreating backs, shrouded in eclipsed light. He lets fraying red threads tangle in fingers and along throbbing pulse, dreams of inseparable pinkies and lingering promises.  
  
Kise knows all the right words to say and exactly when to say them — all except for one.  
  
It’s a simple word, a single syllable. Hardly a trifling thing on the surface, given how loquacious Kise is on nearly every occasion.  
  
But, ah, the word is— how else can it be said? How many other ways already has it been said? The reality of the matter remains: that people can’t always say it, that its meaning shifts with every perspective, that not everyone falls for each other and waits forever like they do in the movies.  
  
Better to let things come as they will, he thinks, and emerge as a natural flow of events and circumstances.  
  
He’s done more than his fair share of chasing in his lifetime (running after the brightest star in his own sky only to find himself stumbling into a bramble-laden forest, love’s labyrinth unexplored), so all the better to let someone else do the running this time.  
  
Better to let someone reach out to him for a change.

 

* * *

 

Summer will always be the season Kise recalls the brightest and clearest.  
  
On the surface, that first summer at Kaijou is unremarkable at best. Modeling keeps him busier than ever and he has to take supplemental classes as well.  
  
Kise misses practice session after practice session. How he’ll make up for lost time with those as well is a mystery.  
  
That is, until Kasamatsu shows up at his front doorstep one humid late-July evening and drags him, slippers and pajamas and a change of clothes hastily tucked under his arm, all the way down to the courts in the nearby park.  
  
“Nice to see you haven’t slipped in the weeks you haven’t come to practice,” the captain chuckles, challenging him to rematches again and again, over and over. It isn’t until they’re both reeling from the exhilaration of such high-paced play for more games than either can count on their hands and toes that they trudge around the fencing and slump down in the bleachers. Kasamatsu conjures towels and water bottles from his worn out duffel bag, but Kise’s more grateful for the shoulder to lean on. “You might’ve been slacking one way, but you aren’t taking it easy. That’s good.”  
  
“Well,” Kise holds his water bottle to his flushed cheeks, sidelong grin and shallow breathing not entirely related to a post-game high, “when it comes to basketball and the team, I aim to please.”  
  
The older boy blinks, fast, like he always does when something Kise says blows him away a little. When he tosses his towel right at Kise’s face, the blond tips back and actually almost falls off the bench.  
  
He’s about to finish dabbing away the last stray beads of sweat when a quiet admission, gruff and chagrined as always, flutters around his too-keen senses:  
  
“I thought you said,” the low cadence resonates, a touch sheepish and a touch bewildered, “you didn’t like to think of yourself as playing for the team’s sake.”  
  
When he lets the towel drop — hesitant at first, not sure whether he wants to see the look Kasamatsu wears as he stirs up old remarks and repressed recollections — he shifts just a little bit closer to the senior and turns to bump their foreheads together.  
  
“It’s not just ‘the team’ anymore, senpai.” The instant their eyes meet, amber-gold against azure, Kise can’t help but smile at the easing wrinkle to his captain’s brow. “It’s my team.”  
  
Our team, he thinks, a softer tinge to his upturned lips.  
  
His team, led by someone like Kasamatsu (who outright chuckles and gives an unusually light punch to his left shoulder, who shoves him away without any real malice, who ruffles his still damp hair before standing to stretch) is a team he’s proud to belong to.  
  
The realization of it that summer stirs something in his chest unnameable, something indistinct and obscure.  
  
(The truth is — though he swears it was just his imagination, swears it was an illuminated moonbeam angled just shy of the shorter male’s face, swears to the current day it wasn’t — seeing Kasamatsu Yukio’s slight smile was what made him fall in love.)

 

* * *

 

The autumn equinox brings rain showers _and_ flowers, much to Kise’s surprise.  
  
Not of the literal kind, of course. The effervescent hues cast a kind of spell over his emotions, fiery leaf flurries and delicate dapples of daylight’s dew on dandelions reminiscent of the slow blaze of revelations in his own heart.  
  
Kise no longer wants to wait.  
  
It’s a shock to him, really. For the first time in his life, he’s discontent.  
  
It’s not the brief encounters on the streetside with Kagami and Kuroko (they’re closer, Kise knows the instant goodbyes are exchanged and they turn on their heels to head home, to reaching a higher plane than ever aspired to before; synchronized motions familiar and yet not, dissimilar tenors marked by affectionate nuances, the growing ease and fleeting touch of Kagami’s hands on the crown of a vaguely smiling Kuroko’s hair) that make him realize it.  
  
It isn’t the chance meetings with Takao and Midorima (the former as lively as ever, linking arms with Kise and swinging around lampposts while the latter insisted, for the umpteenth time, that he and Takao were _not_ on a date yet never once wandering away from his former teammate and current partner, no matter how many persistent and well-intentioned jokes and asides were tossed about) that shake his perception on life and love and longing, either.  
  
It isn’t even the residual effects of that devastating loss against Touou at the Interhigh tournament (though he’s not prone to the same stalwart faith in otherworldly things like Midorima, Kise thinks that was a form of fate at work, melting away archaic wax wings and former idolatry in a way that leaves him transformed, changed for the better entirely; he’ll thank Aomine for it, someday, when the wound isn’t so fresh) that changes Kise’s mind, that casts lights along a different path entirely.  
  
No, Kise thinks, it isn’t any of these things which shatter his old beliefs and alter his course permanently.   It isn’t his old teammates or any hierarchies that compel the finer workings of his heart to begin moving again.  
  
At the very least, it’s the momentary graze of gentle fingers, sliding from elbow to open palm, tucked comfortably in the crevices of his clasped hand.  
  
At the very least, it’s the ephemeral pressure of warm lips, light in the lasting memory it makes yet firm in their insistence at holding him, just like the strong arms of the older boy who smiles at him, at *him* of all people, with eyes that regard him with a gentle familiarity impossible to replicate.  
  
At the very least, it’s the desperation that comes with knowing the transience of love, the short-lived happiness which inevitably comes to an end when flickering flames lose their spark and circumstance pulls them apart, the fearful epiphany that winter and spring will be the last seasons they’ll spend like this —  
  
— but Kasamatsu (no, **Yukio** , Kise finds himself grinning in spite of himself at the thought, an awestruck stupor to his stumbling walk with his captain and now lover down the winding trail alongside senescent maple trees, their hands still intertwined) keeps him steady and staves off the uncertain future with such confidence that Kise can’t help but want to believe that they can last the seasons into the next year and beyond.

 

* * *

 

The snow drifts in, slow and steady, sweeping past condensation-marred windowpanes and leaving a pallid hush its path.  
  
Indoors, the already heated kotatsu waits for its former company to return. A bowl of oranges, poised atop its wooden surface, remains untouched. Silence blankets the living area of Yukio’s apartment suite, much like the whirling winds outside washed the rest of the world in white.  
  
The rest of the world could wait, Kise thinks, knees and bare feet pressed into the cool floorboards while his hands, restless, clutch Yukio’s forearm holding his waist from behind with a keening exhale.  
  
It doesn’t make the shorter male’s grip on him lessen nor distract him from the deep, languid thrusts in and out, each deliberate slide of skin and shared body heat drawing them closer together.  
  
Together.  
  
Kise wants to say something, something that can’t be verbalized with that single word ( _we’re running out of time, I can’t wait anymore; please don’t leave me, I need you, I love you; I need to love you and I love to need you; I’m sorry I fell in love with you, senpai— I’m sorry for everything, please don’t graduate and leave me behind_ ) and perhaps never could be.  
  
But the way his throat constricts and his form shudders at the hitch to the breathless murmur of his name from Yukio’s lips against his jawline distracts him, emboldens a quickening pace, and he loses himself in the iridescence, in the flash-bang of primary colors swirling behind blurring vision and fading conscience.  
  
(He forgets, in the end, to say it before the pleasure comes in cresting and falling waves.  
  
It hurts more than it should, in the aftermath, knowing that he lost his one and only chance to say it.  
  
This winter will be a short one, after all.)

 

* * *

 

But spring arrived far too quickly for both their liking.  
  
Graduation day fell on a clear-skied and crisp mid-March morning. The cusp of changing seasons was heralded by the reappearance of sakura in full bloom.  
  
It might have been laughable if Kise had any heart left in him to laugh.  
  
Kise smiles when he passes Moriyama and Hayakawa and Kobori, though, taking their shoulder pats and bumps and high-fives in turn. They march like soldiers in an uneven row, ever the lightweight champions, heroes in their own right as they head off to meet with others waiting to greet them after the graduation ceremony. Pride swells within him seeing them walk on ahead without him, knowing he was a part of the experience that shaped them into the young men they became.  
  
He wonders what the incoming freshman will think, bright-eyed and full of vigilance, when they hear stories about the team that took their losses and stood tall against the unbeatable odds — Kaijou High’s basketball team, now headed by second year rising model-slash-superstar, Kise Ryouta.  
  
Yukio finds him after almost everyone’s left, phone numbers and farewell exchanges at last complete.  
  
“Well,” Yukio begins, somewhat awkward with one hand steadying a bouquet and his diploma tucked under his right arm and the other flattening the messy strands of lengthening dark bangs, “I guess this is it.”  
  
“I guess so,” Kise quips, but his boyfriend caught the slight sharpness to his exhale and grabbed his chin to bring the blond down (a small tug, really, as Yukio had grown quite a bit in the past few months) to his eye level. “—You’re gonna break all my fans’ hearts, senpai, if you kiss me here.”  
  
“Who said I was planning on kissing you?” When their foreheads knock together, Kise chuckles and recalls the start of everything: the courtside conversation, the sparkle of light to Yukio’s eyes that summer night, the juxtaposition between what he didn’t know he wanted and what he knew he would need. “Stupid.”  
  
“It must say a lot about you,” laughs Kise — wholehearted and free — held steady by the affectionate glow in his former captain’s gaze, “if you’re about to go off to such a prestigious college on scholarship and you chose to date this ‘stupid’ guy.”  
  
“Or maybe I’m the stupid one,” retorts Yukio, wrapping both arms around Kise before lifting his diploma to hide from sight their lips mere centimeters apart, “for falling in love with you.”  
  
The distance between will grow from here, Kise knows.  
  
But for the first time in his life, the thought doesn’t frighten him. It makes his heart swell with a kind of hope he never knew possible before, plans for the future nebulous but full of promise. They had an apartment and several catalogs of furniture already picked out, after all.  
  
They have plenty more seasons left together, Kise decides — pulling Yukio ever closer, assurances and words of love unnecessary, and smiles into Yukio's first post-graduation kiss — as they have plenty more days before they would ever dream of graduating from each other.  



End file.
